At this time of year, when the popular press runs articles on Christmas customs, a few rhetorical bases are always touched. The Christmas tree is a “Pagan survival,” that sort of thing. And that Christmas bears some relationship to the Roman celebration of Saturnalia.
At Religion Nerd, Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., goes more deeply into the origins of Saturnalia in a post titled, “A Further Note on Cronus and Chronos.”
Greek and Roman religions were religions without canonical scriptures; their mythology is notoriously complex and, to modern eyes, often contradictory. It is important to add that this does not mean that there was no religious writing in the ancient world; just the opposite, in fact. There was an excess of religious writing. And of religious images, as well. There is so much writing from the ancient world about the gods, in fact, spanning so many centuries, that it is well-nigh impossible to make systematic sense of it all.
I came away thinking that a lot of what we think we know came from a couple of well-known Roman writers, such as Virgil. As usual, first came the festival and then came the religio-literary explanation of what it all meant.
I’m intrigued by the parallel between Sabbath and Saturnalia – both hark back to a period of ancient peace and harmony.
Is this why English has Saturday for Sabbath?
Does any other language derive the weekday name from Saturn? I’m guessing that Samstag and Samedi are from “Sabbath”, as Sabado obviously is.
There is also an East Asian parallel, as E Asian languages have “Earth day” for Saturday, eg. Doyobi in Japanese. Earth is one of the five elements in ancient Chinese thought, and these five give the names of the planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and also five of the weekday names.
There is one little problem with what Ruprecht says. He implies that ancient/classical Greco-Roman Paganism was somehow less “systematic” than …. what, for instance?
Theologically speaking, classical Pagans were far more systematic than either Christians or Muslims (of any historical period). In particular, there is a natural coherence in Pagan religious traditions that is totally lacking in any form of Christianity (much less Christianity taken as a “whole”, if such a whole actually exists).
Ancient Pagan religions were able to peacefully coexist with (and arguably participated directly in) the development of philosophy itself, including natural philosophy (ie, “science”). Christianity, on the other hand, suppressed philosophy and criminalized rational inquiry into both natural and supernatural topics, and only in the last two centuries or so has begun, partially and unevenly, to reconcile itself with free intellectual and spiritual inquiry.
It may have seemed systemactic — or been systemized — by philosophers of the school of Plato. But to the general populace? And let us not overlook, as Ruprecht points out, the long-lasting effects of a few works of literature that, again, may or may not have been representative of what people thought — yet we treat them as definitive of entire eras.